The End of an Era
This year we say our goodbyes to a towering figure at CSU and in the world of philosophy, Holmes Rolson III, who passed away this February at the age of 92. His extraordinary legacy to the field of environmental philosophy begins with some milestone achievements: publishing one of the first environmental ethics articles in a mainline philosophy journal (“Is There An Ecological Ethic?” in Ethics in 1975); sitting on the inaugural editorial board of the journal Environmental Ethics in 1979; serving as the first President of the International Society of Environmental Ethics at its creation in 1990; writing seven books; publishing hundreds of journal articles and book chapters; speaking to countless audiences across seven continents. Former student and biographer Christopher Preston shares that, “at ninety-years-old in 2023, he was still participating enthusiastically in the society’s annual meeting at Allenspark, Colorado. The thousands of students and colleagues who have read, taught, and learned from his work over the last fifty years can probably agree, there was no one quite like Holmes.”
Rolston’s life and legacy have been commemorated in the New York Times, the Denver Gazette, and widely across philosophy publications. For a more intimate celebration, we invite all to join together for a memorial on the CSU campus this September and to enjoy a collection of personal remembrances we’ve collated to capture the kindness and wit of the Holmes we knew.
The Department also shares in the grief of losing Jane Rolston just two months after Holmes this spring. Jane’s warmth, wisdom, and welcoming hospitality were a staple for the generations of faculty and students who worked with Holmes. She is missed dearly.
Visiting Scholars
This year, we continued our tradition of hosting leading scholars from across the country. Chris Cuomo (University of Georgia) was selected as the the Distinguished Lecturer in Environmental Ethics. In October, Cuomo argued in her talk that without intense ethical caring about nature itself, the sufficient motivation to effectively address climate change will elude us. In March, we hosted Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University) who gave the Bernie Rollin Memorial Lecture in Animal Ethics. Gruen explored what it means to think and act on the notion that animals have dignity and worth.
Our department colloquia were rich in sparking dialogue and ongoing collaborations. They also featured a diverse range of topics and traditions. Our speakers included Aun Hasan Ali (CU Boulder) on the Twelver Shii tradition, Paul Fischer on early Chinese philosophies, Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval (UC Davis) on race and historical contextualization, Michael Wiitala (Cleveland State University) on Boethius, Melinda Fagan (University of Utah) on explanatory particularism in science, and our very own Nathalie Morasch on gender and linguistic awareness and Paul DiRado on Iamblichus’ defense of paganism.
Grad Student News
First-year graduate student Kyle Barnes presented at the 27th Annual Rocky Mountain Philosophy Conference and the South Carolina Society for Philosophy on Spinoza’s Ethics. Kyle’s papers focus on his preliminary thesis topic—Spinoza’s conception of scientia intuitiva and its susceptibility to akrasia (acting against one’s better judgement).
This spring we had a bumper crop of MA completions, including Michael Corazza, Jordan Davies, Jade Ellis, Amy Schmidt, Coner Segren, Adam Villegas, Shayne Weber, and Michael Wong. The theses topics ranged from Socratic dialectic, causal loops, and Spinoza and Aristotle’s methodologies to animal personhood and the ethics of care. Congrats to all our new graduates!
New alum, Jade Ellis, is happily employed as a paralegal at the District Attorney’s Office in Colorado Springs. She is intrigued by observing justice being played out in a very practical way though she reports that the ethical ambiguity of our criminal justice system is top of mind as she works. Despite working hard and missing all of us in Fort Collins, Jade is finding time to do the things she enjoys — trail running, hiking, spending time with her partner, dog, and friends — even if some of those activities must take place before the sun has risen. She also tries to find time to invite philosophical dialogue into her life; usually in the form of talking to the great friends she made in the program and pestering them with insights and questions she’s had while listening to podcasts or reading less traditionally academic philosophical works.
Faculty Notes
The highlights for Ashby Butnor this year were teaching another iteration of her Green & Gold Seminar on Happiness last fall and then traveling with first-year students to Denmark this August for an international version of the course. Ashby attended the Pacific APA in San Francisco in April and presented “Questioning the Canon: Lessons from Charles Mills’ Black Radical Kantianism.” The rest of her time was spent attending meetings, replying to emails, marketing events, communicating the value of philosophy, and grading.
Paul DiRado contributed a book chapter, “The Veridicality of Noein and the Particularity of Noos in Parmenides’ Poem and the Continuity Between Parmenides, Homer, and Hesiod’s Usages,” in Inquiring into Being: Essays on Parmenides (SUNY 2025). In the spring, Paul gave a presentation at CSU on the Roman philosopher Iamblichus wherein he tried to lay out his philosophical defense of traditional Greco-Roman religious practices. He also hosted Dr. Michael Wiitala from Cleveland State who gave a talk on human immortality in Boethius. With Eirik Harris, Paul started a reading group for faculty and graduate students in which they read lesser-known and non-Western figures from the history of philosophy, including Islamic philosopher Al-Farabi and Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi.
Moti Gorin co-authored a paper, “Toward Evidence-Based and Ethical Pediatric Gender Medicine,” published in a leading medical journal, JAMA. He also presented at the 21st International Congress of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) this summer in Strasbourg, France.
Over the past year, Eirik Harris spent a week as a visiting scholar at Hong Kong University, where he gave a series of talks. He also participated in the 7th Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy this spring. Several of Eirik’s book chapters have recently been published, including “The Dao of Han Fei” in the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Philosophy, “Mozi and Han Feizi” in the Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, “Early Chinese Political Realists” in Chinese Philosophy and its Thinkers, and “Morality vs. Impartial Standards in the Shenzi Fragments” and “Human Motivations in the fa Traditions” – both in the Dao Companion to China’s fa Traditions.
Over the summer, Eirik worked to finish off two books, including Explaining and Illustrating the Laozi: The Earliest Commentaries on the Daodejing, edited with Eric Hutton and Political Meritocracy in Early China. Eirik and his wife Thai’s summer vacation plans have been hampered by recent immigration policies making family trips abroad risky, though they did finally start learning how to downhill ski this past winter.
This year, Alyson Huff continued her research into pedagogy and assessment presenting locally at CSU’s Universal Design for Learning conference and nationally at The Grading Conference on Holistic Assessments, a form of non-traditional grading. Additionally, she earned a teaching effectiveness domain certificate on Classroom Climate through The Institute for Teaching and Learning after completing ten professional development trainings, implementing those practices, and reflecting on their pedagogical effectiveness. Beyond work, she volunteers at her daughter’s school and spends as much time outside as possible.
Jeff Kasser went to quite a few places in academic year 2024-25, but Eddy Hall was rarely among them as he enjoyed his second CSU sabbatical. He gave talks in Boulder and in San Francisco pummeling people with puzzlement about Peirce and probability. After sending off the first fruits of the sabbatical, he headed to Ireland with his family this summer. But what goes around comes around. The price of his respite from teaching and attending meetings includes pinch-hitting for the formidable Domenica Romagni in our graduate program this fall. He will offer a seminar on the history of attempts to ground aspects of epistemic normativity in broadly psychological stability. He will try not to disappoint Domenica too much.
Andrew Lopez supervised his first MA student, Shayne Weber, who successfully defended a thesis on animal rights, welfare, and legal personhood. Andrew was invited to participate in the “Human Minds and Animal Welfare” conference and workshop at Boston University in the fall and presented work at meetings for the Canadian Philosophical Association and the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Science. On the publication front, Andrew had an article on Mexican philosophy and internet politics recently accepted at Ergo. In late June, he attended the NEWLAMP 2025 workshop, focusing on learning and teaching social and political philosophy from the African continent. Andrew began this summer by visiting friends and family but then hunkered down to work on research and to prep for teaching his first graduate seminar in the fall on interspecies politics (and had a few patio beers here and there).
After completing his five-year term as department chair last July, Matt MacKenzie has been happily on sabbatical. He presented at the Eastern APA in January and the Pacific APA in April. His 20-chapter edited volume, Thinking without Borders: Essays in Honor of Arindam Chakrabarti, is now in press with Bloomsbury Academic, with an expected publication date of January 2026. His recent article, “Reflexivity, Intentionality, and the Embodied Subject: A Phenomenological Reflection in Honor of J.N. Mohanty” was published in Philosophy East and West (July 2025). And, he also just submitted his second monograph, Consciousness in Indian Philosophy: Illuminating Mind, Self, and World, to Bloomsbury this summer. He didn’t do as much paddle boarding as he would have liked on sabbatical. He did, however, earn black belts in both karate and jujitsu, which confirms that he is a glutton for punishment.
Cheri Noblitt took partial maternity leave in the fall so she could continue teaching her favorite course, Religions of the East. During that time, she also designed a fresh online Appreciation of Philosophy course that ran for the first time in the spring semester. The course’s aim is for philosophy to feel more relatable to all beginning level students. Major philosophical issues are presented with more exposure to female thinkers and various cultural perspectives. Cheri also participated in two TILT offerings this past year; the Empowering Students Through Generative AI workshop and a Best Practices in Teaching (BPiT) course, Accessible and Inclusive Electronic Content. She is excited to implement what she has learned so her courses are more universally accessible. She spent much of her summer on backyard landscaping projects, and enjoyed a relaxing family vacation in Tensleep, WY.
Collin Rice is extremely honored to be named the 2025 Monfort Professor, which is given to only one CSU professor each year. Collin’s project will focus on how the skills of philosophy can help improve science communication concerning the use of idealization, dissent, and values in science. He recently published a paper titled “A Model-Based Approach to the Problem of Variable Choice” in Philosophy of Science and a paper with Kareem Khalifa (UCLA) titled “Thank You for Misunderstanding!” in Philosophical Studies. Over the summer, he gave talks in Porto, Portugal, backpacked through Glacier National Park, and played shows with his band Spectrum They.
Domenica Romagni is happy to report that three of her MA students – Michael Corazza, Adam Villegas, and Coner Segren – successfully defended this year. All three put in hard work and did an exceptional job! Domenica also led a graduate seminar on Spinoza in the fall, which featured visiting speaker Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval (UC Davis). Alongside her teaching for the year, she presented work at conferences in Boulder, New Orleans, New York, and Ankara, Türkiye and has had articles on Kepler’s music theory, his philosophy of mind, and Descartes’ views on sensory perception accepted for publication. She also helped to organize the annual Traveling Early Modern Philosophy Organization (TEMPO) conference, held at Georgetown University this year, and co-led a reading group on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the spring leading up to the conference. Finally, she officially earned tenure and promotion to associate professor at the end of the spring semester. She is looking forward to spending the summer working on her first book – a contribution on Spinoza’s aesthetics to Cambridge University Press’s Elements series – and relaxing with her dog Hank.
Ken Shockley spent the academic year settling into his role as chair. He is still settling in. He did manage to work on a few papers on vulnerability, despair, harm, and other cheery topics. He gave talks in Cork, Dublin, Norfolk, and Orlando in the spring of 2025, and a few other talks around CSU over the academic year. His published work this year includes a paper on vulnerability, a book chapter on hope, and a multi-authored paper exploring the interconnections between One Health and Human Wildlife Coexistence. He coedited (with Katie McShane) a special issue of Environmental Ethics and continues to coedit (with Clare Palmer) a special issue of the Monist, slated for publication early spring 2026. He is currently working on papers on risk, the contrast between hope and despair, and environmental harm; and he is trying to find time for a larger book project on environmental vulnerability while whittling away at a longer-term project on the role of narrative in environmental ethics.
Ken continues to promote, direct, and teach a course in the Mountain Campus Program in the Environmental Humanities, which provides intensive experiential education to students at CSU’s Mountain Campus. He enjoys his ongoing work with several CSU-based research collaborations: the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence, CSU’s Climate Change Initiative, and the Climate Adaptation Partnership. Ken served as coauthor and co-PI on several grants funded by CSU’s OVPR and Warner College, which will launch a collaboration focused on vulnerability and climate adaptation, and another on migratory ungulate conservation governance.
He still finds time to do a bit of hiking and running and has returned to his early love of the martial arts. It turns out that being chair involves staring at a lot of memos and spreadsheets. Moving quickly, either outdoors or in the dojo, is a highly recommended countermeasure.